● 04.07.17

● Links 7/4/2017: Canonical Layoffs, GNOME Paint Coming

Posted in News Roundup at 4:12 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• After years of many Intel and ARM Chromebooks, the first AMD-powered Chromebook appears to be gearing up for release.

• Continuing with tradition, the AMD Chromebook is using Coreboot. Thus we have the first signs of it via Coreboot code review with this new Google board being codenamed “Kahlee.” The Coreboot code began appearing for review just minutes ago after other Kahlee references in the Chrome OS world have been found in recent weeks.

• Next week Microsoft will begin the slowish rollout of its big update to Windows 10, the Creators Update.

• Right now, it’s doing a little damage control, and preempting complaints about privacy, by listing the types of information its operating system will automatically and silently leak from PCs, slabs, and laptops back to Redmond.

• When Windows 10 came out, Reg readers were alarmed by the volume of information the software was collecting and sending back to base. Ever since then, Microsoft has been fighting a PR battle to reassure people that such data slurping isn’t all bad – it’s “just” telemetry and diagnostics and potentially your files.

• Now Redmond’s had a little rethink for the Creators Update, and decided to come clean on exactly what the software will phone home – even insisting the closed-source operating system will scoop up less surveillance this time.

Server

• The network bottleneck needs all the tech talent startups can throw at it. The Linux Foundation’s OpenSwitch Project wants to remove lower-stack roadblocks that might stifle their innovation.

• “We’re seeing startups come in and do really, really interesting things really, really well,” said Drew Schulke (pictured), vice president of converged networking at Dell EMC.

• However, they could do more in less time if the foundation of their work were provided in advance, he added. To this end, Dell contributed the base operating system for the OpenSwitch Project.

Kernel Space

• Jerome Glisse has published his latest massive patch-set for supporting Heterogeneous Memory Management within the mainline Linux kernel.

• This CONFIG_LOCK_DOWN_KERNEL option would tighten up what user-space can access/modify when running in this mode, likely paired to running under UEFI SecureBoot. Some of these restrictions in the kernel lockdown mode include no unsigned modules or modules that can’t validate the signature, no use of ioperm/iopl() or writing to /dev/port, no writing to /dev/mem or /dev/kmem, no hibernation support, restricting PCI BAR and MSI access, no kexec_load(), some ACPI restrictions, and restricting debugfs access too. This would sharply tighten up what user-space can access/control when running in this mode.

• Ben Hutchings, Linux kernel developer and mainter of the Linux 3.2 and 3.16 long-term support kernel branches announced today, April 6, 2017, the availability of two new maintenance releases, namely Linux 3.16.43 LTS and Linux 3.2.88 LTS.

• While Linux kernel 3.2.88 LTS is a very small bugfix release that only changes a total of 5 files, with 10 insertions and 8 deletions, adding a security fix and a couple of networking improvements for the IPv4 and L2TP protocols, Linux kernel 3.16.43 LTS is here to change a total of 48 files, with 366 insertions and 1246 deletions, according to the appended shortlog.

• Intel’s open-source Linux graphics driver developers have begun publishing patches for initial hardware enablement of Cannonlake’s “Gen 10″ graphics and the Cannonpoint PCH.

• For privacy-minded Linux users, finding the best TrueCrypt alternative is now easier than ever as Jetico, developer of world-class data encryption software, has just updated BestCrypt Container Encryption to include Container Guard. This unique feature of Jetico’s Linux file encryption protects container files from unauthorized or accidental commands, delivering added security and peace of mind.

Graphics Stack

• For those wanting to follow the work Keith Packard is doing for Valve around better supporting VR HMDs (Head Mounted Displays) on the open-source driver stack, he’s made a proposal for some changes in what would become RandR 1.6.

• It has 3840 cuda cores with a memory speed of 11.4 Gbps and a massive 12 GB GDDR5X with an impressive memory bandwidth of 547.7 GB/s. It supports a max resolution of 7680×4320 at 60Hz, for those high definition display you’re all hoarding.

• Nvidia published today a new Beta graphics driver for Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris operating system, adding support for various new Nvidia GPUs, improving compatibility with newer kernels, and fixing a bunch of issues.

• Let’s start with the newly implemented support for some of Nvidia’s recently announced GPUs, as the Nvidia 381.09 Beta graphics drivers appears to offer out-of-the-box support for Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, Nvidia Quadro M520, and Nvidia TITAN Xp for VR gaming, but also restores support for the Nvidia GRID K520 GPU.

Benchmarks

• With the upcoming Linux 4.11 kernel release as well as for the next cycle (Linux 4.12), the Radeon DRM driver remains the default for AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs while the newer AMDGPU DRM driver continues offering “experimental” support for these earlier generations of GCN GPUs. As it’s been a while since our last Radeon vs. AMDGPU GCN 1.0/1.1 benchmarks, here are some fresh tests today with Linux 4.11 Git.

Applications

• The darktable development team announced today the release and immediate availability of darktable 2.2.4, the fourth maintenance update to the most stable and advanced branch of the open-source and cross-platform RAW image editor tool.

• Coming two months after the 2.2.3 point release, darktable 2.2.4 is here to introduce two new scripts, one for purging stale image thumbnails and another one for watching a specific folder for new photos, as well as to improve the opacity handling of the brush trace to offer better control to the user.

• I’ve started working on simple drawing application for GNOME. Current state – just started (see the current screenshot [1]), but progressing. Help needed (especially UX guys).

• While there is GIMP for advanced image manipulation and then a few other alternatives for more simpler image manipulation or drawing, a new “GNOME Paint” program is in development.

• GNOME Paint is a new project that’s just begun and is being led by GNOME developer Marcin Kolny. His goal for GNOME Paint is to be a simple drawing application — think like Microsoft Paint.

• Ibus typing booster is a predictive text input method which helps users to improve the typing speed without compromising on data accuracy.

• It provides full featured and simple user friendly interface for input method. The purpose of application is to make typing of native languages more easier and faster by providing completion and spell checking suggestions. It is a new input framework for Linux OS.

• Polychromatic, an unofficial GUI and tray applet for configuring Razer peripherals on Linux, was updated to version 0.3.8 today, bringing a completely overhauled tray / AppIndicator applet which only shows options relevant to your device(s), along with other changes.

Proprietary

• Vivaldi’s Ruarí Ødegaard reports on the availability of the first minor maintenance update to the Vivaldi 1.8 web browser, versioned 1.8.770.54, which includes a few important bug fixes and rebases the project on the latest Chromium release.

• Vivaldi 1.8 launched a week ago, at the end of March, and brought with it a brand-new and revolutionary History feature, as well as numerous other improvements, such as advanced tab muting options, the ability to create notes using drag and drop, and a new option for displaying hibernated tabs in grayscale.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Paradox Development Studios has been busy as of late with new content for both Stellaris and Europa Universalis IV [Official Site] coming out on the same day. The latest expansion to their sprawling grand strategy game has been released, adding plenty of content to Asia.

• A Linux version of EVERSPACE [Steam] might finally be on the horizon, as the developers shared more details on the bug and a user on Steam pointed the developer to a possible workaround for now.

• Good to see more local multiplayer games! Moribund [Steam, Official Site] recently released for Linux and it’s brutal, so grab a friend and annihilate them.

• Game porter Ethan Lee has been working away behind the scenes and it seems both The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile [Steam Link] & Charlie Murder [Steam Link] will release soon with Linux support.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Today we all read the announcement of Ubuntu’s decision to refocus on cloud and IoT activities, dropping Unity 8 to move back to a GNOME-based desktop for the 18.04 LTS. This marks a return to the fold, with Ubuntu having originally shipped GNOME all those years ago, and lest we forget, having contributed to early Wayland discussions.

• This is obviously a large, and undoubtedly difficult, decision that will have ramifications for years to come. Particularly in the user-facing aspects, unifying the desktops will help combine forces and be much more productive. For developers, a lot of the differentials in desktop technology (e.g. indicators, menus, scrollbars) between the two may now be at an end, making generic Linux an easier target for ISVs. And, assuming a GNOME Shell port to Mir is not underway, we are back at only supporting two window systems: X11 and Wayland.

• Fedora has already been shipping the GNOME Wayland session by default since Fedora 25, with broadly positive reception. (My personal favourite review: ‘the transition to Wayland has been totally transparent … GNOME 3.22 feels considerably smoother with Wayland’.) Should Ubuntu follow Fedora’s lead and ship a Wayland-based GNOME session by default, then developers across all platforms will get all the benefits of the work done to Wayland in general, as well as EGL and Vulkan enablement, across the board for free. And we’ll undoubtedly see more focus on it.

• While I’m known as a Vala fanboy in GNOME, I’ve tried to stress time and again that I see Vala as more a practical solution than an ideal one. “Safe programming” has always been something that intrigued me, having dealt with numerous crashes and other hard-to-debug runtime issues in the past. So when I first heard of Rust some years back, it got me super excited but it was not exactly stable and there was no integration with GNOME libraries or D-Bus and hence it was not at all a viable option for developing desktop code. Lately (in past 2 years) things have significantly changed. Not only we have Rust 1.0 but we also have crates that provide integration with GNOME libraries and D-Bus. On top of that, some of us took steps to start converting some C code into Rust and many of us started seriously talking with Rust hackers to make Rust a first class programming language for GNOME.

• So as most of you probably know Mark Shuttleworth just announced that they will be switching to GNOME 3 and Wayland again for Ubuntu. So I would like to on behalf of the Red Hat Desktop and Fedora teams to welcome them and say that we look forward to keep working with great Canonical and Ubuntu people like Allison Lortie and Robert Ancell on projects of shared interest around GNOME, Wayland and hopefully Flatpak.

• It is worth mentioning that even as we been competing with Unity and Ubuntu we have also been collaborating with them, most recently on working with them to integrate the features they wanted from GNOME Software like the user reviews, but of course now sharing a bigger set of technologies collaboration will be even easier.

Distributions

Reviews

• Fatdog64 has the potential to outpace similar Linux distros, but its developers first must fix the numerous flaws that are holding it back.

• Loading much of a distro’s core elements into RAM is a proven method for delivering lightning-fast performance. However, Fatdog64 gets in its own way by failing to provide an option for storing essential files on the hard drive, which would reduce the need to read them from the CD/DVD or USB drives. Its performance is therefore noticeably sluggish compared to Puppy Linux and other “portable” distros.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• Eighteen openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots brought several new packages to users last month, which included both GNOME 3.24 and KDE Plasma 5.9.4.

• GNOME 3.24 received most of the hype in snapshot 20170322, but that release also included Mozilla Firefox’s newest 52.0.1 version, which added support for WebAssembly, an emerging standard that brings near-native performance to Web-based games, apps, and software libraries without the use of plugins.

• Closing out the month, snapshot 20170331 brought git 2.12.2 that provided a Command Line Interface output fix and python 3.6.1, which provided some bug fixes and updates to documentation. Ruby 2.2 switched to git-branch based patching and patched an exploitable heap overflow vulnerability for CVE-2016-2339.

• openSUSE’s Douglas DeMaio is back with news for users of the openSUSE Tumbleweed operating system series, informing them about the latest technologies and updated applications that landed in the repositories.

• The developer starts his weekly report by reminding us that openSUSE Tumbleweed was the first GNU/Linux distribution to ship the latest GNOME 3.24 desktop environment to its users. A total of eighteen snapshots appear to have been released for Tumbleweed users, bringing all the newest apps, including the Mozilla Firefox 52.0.1 web browser and KDE Plasma 5.9.4 desktop environment.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst welcomed partners to the Raleigh, N.C.-based open-source software leader’s North America partner conference in Las Vegas with some good news.

• On the first day of the summit, Red Hat released impressive fourth-quarter earnings that sent its stock soaring. Those better-than-expected financials were powered by strong subscription revenue, not just in its flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system, but across the portfolio of cloud-enabling technologies, with especially strong growth across an emerging application development platform.

Finance

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical is axing staff and closing projects under a sudden commercial get-fit regime.

• You may have read that Canonical is killing its never-delivered Unity 8 project but what everybody missed is that Canonical is also cutting staff.

• Nor will you have read why.

• Following news of Ubuntu abandoning Unity 8 there are now reports of headcount reductions happening at Canonical and Mark Shuttleworth eyeing possible outside investments into the company.

• Our friends at The Register have just issued a report that more than half the team who worked on Unity 8 is being let go. Some Unity developers are being assigned to other departments at Canonical while other developers not finding a good fit elsewhere are being sent to the door.

• Following yesterday’s news of Canonical dropping work on Unity 8 and Ubuntu Phone and switching back to GNOME as their desktop environment, some community developers are determined to keep the projects going.

• Marius Gripsgård who is known for his work on UBports, the community effort trying to port Ubuntu Touch to as many devices as possible, is determined to keep going and looking to maintain Unity 8. He wrote on Google+ yesterday, “I’m not giving up! I will do my best to keep Ubuntu touch and Unity8 standing on both it’s legs! It will be hard. The Ubuntu touch wheel is still spinning, and it has enough momentum to spin until we start spinning it with hopefully with greater force. Expect some news and idea drafts from the Ubports team in the coming weeks.”

• Canonical, the software support company that maintains Ubuntu Linux, has announced it is throwing in the towel on Ubuntu phones and tablets and ending work on Unity8…

• Running Ubuntu Linux on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud is a fairly common practice. Though Ubuntu has been available in the AWS marketplace for years, until recently there wasn’t a version of Ubuntu with a Linux kernel that was specifically tuned for the AWS environment.

• Dustin Kirkland, the leader of product manager at Canonical, recently asked the folks at HackerNews what they would like to see done for Ubuntu 17.10. He’s collected their feedback and offered a few insights into the current happenings.

• He received more than one thousand comments of feedback and can be viewed via this HN post. Today Dustin wrote a blog post to organize the feedback and share some thoughts on some of the ideas.

• While some still believe that it will be impossible for a small team to keep the development of the Unity 8 and Ubuntu Touch alive after Canonical’s decision to abandon both projects, UBports founder Marius Gripsgård thinks different.

• We reported the other day that the leader of the UBports community, a team of skilled developers porting Canonical’s Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system to various widely-used mobile devices, such as Fairphone 2 and OnePlus One, announced that he would do everything in his power to keep Unity 8 alive.

• And, Mark, Jane, I know this will have been a tough decision to come to, and this will be a tough day for the different teams affected. Hang in there: Ubuntu has had such a profound impact on open source and while the future path may be a little different, I am certain it will be fruitful.

Devices/Embedded

• iWave has replaced an earlier i.MX6 UL module with an almost identical “iW-RainboW-G18M-SM” COM equipped with the more power efficient i.MX6 ULL.

• iWave has re-released its two-year old iW-RainboW-G18M computer-on-module as a new iW-RainboW-G18M-SM COM that cashes in the old i.MX6 UltraLite (UL) SoC for NXP’s even more energy efficient i.MX6 ULL. The original COM still has its own pull-down menu entry, but when you click on it you are redirected to the new iW-RainboW-G18M-SM. The similarly Linux-driven, SODIMM-style module seems to be identical except for the new SoC. There is, however, a new Pico-ITX development platform, which we cover below.

Phones

Tizen

Android

• TL;DR We tested a bunch of Android tablets to find the best, and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S3 is the cream of the crop with its stellar screen, slick design, and powerful processor.

Free Software/Open Source

• Margaret Chiosi has long been an open source advocate, but the former AT&T, now Huawei, executive acknowledged here today that open source by itself is not enough — and the gap between what it provides and what carrier-class products require is an industry challenge.

• “You have all these open source pieces — they are great initial pieces, but you can’t just clean it up and run it, because it’s not complete,” Chiosi said, in an interview following her keynote presentation here. “The challenge for the industry is how do we get from here to production — there are a lot of gaps.”

• Chiosi’s comments echo those made earlier in the week by another staunch open source proponent, Guru Parulkar, a founder of ONS and current executive director of the Open Networking Foundation. Parulkar noted the resources gap between what open source can deliver — code, proofs-of-concept and lab trials — and the commercialization and hardening processes needed to take products to market. (See Open Source Boom Not Without Challenges.)

• This year’s North American Trading Architecture Summit was packed full of great insight from industry leaders in financial technology.

• Another Waters conference has come and gone, and yet again I’m left with plenty to chew on. The North American Trading Architecture Summit (NATAS) is particularly special for me, as it’s geared more toward the sell side.

• Remember the open source adage that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow?” Well, open source hasn’t quite worked out that way. Heartbleed, Shellshock, and a host of other security holes have made open source, for all its virtues, look somewhat ordinary when it comes to bugginess and security.

• At least, that’s one way to read the data.

• According to open source business luminary and HackerOne CEO Marten Mickos, however, open source absolutely has delivered better security than its proprietary peers. Perhaps even more important, however, is how open source enables bug bounty programs launched by HackerOne and others to be dramatically more successful than they could be in a closed-source context.

Events

• Four events, one name: LinuxCon, ContainerCon, CloudOpen and the all-new Community Leadership Conference have combined to form one big event: Open Source Summit North America. The rebranded event, to be held Sept. 11-13 in Los Angeles, will feature a broader range of open source topics, and be more inclusive than ever.

• Each of the four conference areas bring a different part of the open source community to the table, providing a holistic overview of the industry for attendees of the new Open Source Summit.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Today, Mozilla is announcing support for the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), an effort to make citation data from scholarly publications open and freely accessible.

• We’re proud to stand alongside the Wikimedia Foundation, the Public Library of Science and a network of other like-minded institutions, publishers and researchers who believe knowledge should be free from restrictions. We want to create a global, public web of citation data — one that empowers teaching, learning, innovation and progress.

• Currently, much of the citation data in scholarly publications is not easily accessible. From geology and chemistry journals to papers on psychology, the citations within are often subject to restrictive and confusing licenses which limit discovery and dissemination of published research. Further, citation data is often not machine readable — meaning we can’t use computer programs to parse the data.

• Mozilla understands that in some cases, scholarly publications themselves must be protected or closed in order to respect proprietary ecosystems and business models. But citations are snippets of knowledge that allow everyone to engage with, evaluate and build upon ideas. When citations are inaccessible, the flow of knowledge stalls. Innovation is chilled. The results are damaging.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• You may not be aware, but Uber offers an open source version of the data visualization framework it uses internally, called deck.gl. The tool was made available to anyone via open source license last November, and now it’s getting some key updates that should help make it more useful to external teams and individuals looking for interesting ways to take their data and turn it into compelling visual representations.

Mastodon

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• A sip of maple water, drawn straight from a steel bucket in the forest is electric; it’s icy crisp, not too sweet, and tastes like trees and sky distilled into light. Perched on snowshoes, sweetly freezing your butt in the sugarbush, it’s like a trickle of forest energy down your throat.

Open Access/Content

• The Wikimedia Foundation, Public Library of Science (PLoS), and other publishers and research organisations have announced an initiative aimed at increase the amount of scholarly citation data freely available online, called the Initiative for Open Citations.

• The I4OC initiative is accessible here. At present, there are 66 participating organisations, including 29 publishers and 33 stakeholders, including the Wellcome Trust, Mozilla, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

• Open access isn’t a new idea — the term was first defined back in 2002, and arguably the first examples go back even further to the founding of arXiv.org in 1991 (pdf). And yet progress towards making all academic knowledge freely available has been frustratingly slow, largely because hugely-profitable publishers have been fighting it every inch of the way. In response to that intransigence, academics have come up with a variety of approaches, including boycotts, mass cancellation of subscriptions, new kinds of overlay journals and simply making everything available with or without permission.

Standards/Consortia

• However, as nice as they look on some platforms, not everyone is able to see emoji in the same way. Even though Unicode declares a standard to ensure that characters are strictly defined and are compatible across any system that uses Unicode, they aren’t responsible for the design of emoji.

Leftovers

• When it comes to digitisation of public services, Europe’s top-three Member States are Estonia, Finland and the Netherlands, according to the EC’s Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI), published on 8 March.

Hardware

• Australia’s consumer watchdog has begun legal action against Apple over claims it refused to repair iPads and iPhones previously serviced by third parties.

Security

• An Indian developer is playing around with an open source ransomware builder, which in the long run may end up causing serious problems for innocent users.

• This developer, who goes by the nickname of Empinel and claims to be based in Mumbai, has forked the open source code of the EDA2 project, and with the help of another user, has removed the backdoor hidden in EDA2′s original code.

• Google is out with its April 2017 Android security update, patching 102 different vulnerabilities in the mobile operating system. Of the vulnerabilities patched by Google this month, only 15 are rated as having critical impact.

• Not surprisingly, the mediasever component is once again being patched by Google. The Android mediasever has been patched in every Android security update issued by Google since August 2015. In the new April update, mediaserver accounts for 15 flaws in total, including six rated as critical, five as high and four with only moderate impact.

• Following on the recent stable and Beta kernel releases for the CloudLinux 7 operating system series, CloudLinux’s Mykola Naugolnyi announced earlier the availability of a new stable kernel update for CloudLinux 6 users.

• The new, updated kernel version 2.6.32-673.26.1.lve1.4.25 is out as of April 6, 2017, and it appears to patch a Linux kernel vulnerability discovered in the udp.c file, which affects kernel versions smaller than 4.5, including the Linux 2.6 kernel running on CloudLinux 6 and CloudLinux 5 Hybrid operating systems.

• Philadelphia is believed to be a new version of the ransomware known as Stampado.

Defence/Aggression

• To wage the global war on terrorism, the leaders of the United States have settled on one basic strategy. Taking advantage of their extraordinary military power, they have tried to kill their way to victory.

• Many in Washington believe the strategy is correct. They argue the terrorists are inherently evil and must be vanquished from the planet. In the case of the Islamic State, both President Barack Obama and President Donald Trump have insisted that the only way to deal with the group is to forcefully eradicate it from the face of the Earth.

• With the latest hasty judgment about Tuesday’s poison-gas deaths in a rebel-held area of northern Syria, the mainstream U.S. news media once more reveals itself to be a threat to responsible journalism and to the future of humanity. Again, we see the troubling pattern of verdict first, investigation later, even when that behavior can lead to a dangerous war escalation and many more deaths.

• Just two and a half months into his presidency, Donald Trump has already distinguished himself as a war criminal. His administration is killing unusually large numbers of civilians, in violation of US and international law.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• The Court of Appeal has ruled that restricted legal documents posted on the WikiLeaks website do not lose their confidential status.

• To rule otherwise would be to encourage hacking and pilferage of such material, it said.

• The apex court was clarifying the issue in its ruling in favour of a company, which had sought to expunge confidential e-mails culled from WikiLeaks by a former employee who was being sued by the firm. The ex-staff wanted to use the documents as part of his defence.

• Leaks from the government and even Congress itself are nothing new. As shown by a declassified memo describing a meeting between Henry Kissinger and CIA Director William Colby, these concerns were among the very ones facing the White House, the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee in the mid-1970s

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• FLOOD-serv project (www.floodserv-project.eu) is an EU co-funded project which started in August 2016 and will be running for 36 months. It aims to provide a complete solution for flood awareness, response actions as well as education regarding flood risks. Through the use of different mobile technologies, the project will make information available in a transparent manner in order to increase the openness of ICT-based technology platforms in the public sector.

• If the billionaire Koch brothers turn to the White House for favors, they will see many familiar faces.

• Newly disclosed ethics forms reveal that a significant number of senior Trump staffers were previously employed by the sprawling network of hard-right and libertarian advocacy groups financed and controlled by Charles and David Koch, the conservative duo hyper-focused on entrenching Republican power, eliminating taxes, and slashing environmental and labor regulations.

• Some of the relationships were well-known. Marc Short, for instance, now Trump’s chief liaison to Congress, previously led Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, the dark money nonprofit used by the Koch brothers and their donor cohort to dispense money to allied groups. Freedom Partners, which maintains an affiliate Super PAC, was at the center of the Kochs’ $750 million election effort during the campaign last year.

• The headline over USA Today‘s story (4/4/17) about an Antarctic ice shelf threatening to break off into an iceberg the size of Delaware: “Chill Out: Antarctic Iceberg Still Holding On.”

• “Chill out,” get it? Because it’s Antarctica.

• An investigation conducted by an Australian animals rights charity, Animals International, has revealed that live exported animals from European Union (EU) countries have been facing severe abuse. Undercover videos show EU cattle and sheep being beaten, given electric shocks, and inhumanely slaughtered at destinations in Turkey and Middle East. These actions clearly breach EU laws for treatment and keeping of livestock. European legislation states that exported animals must be given a certain standard of care throughout their entire journey, and animal handlers are directed to perform their job without using methods that may instill unnecessary fear or suffering in the animals. However, European legislation only covers the animals until they are delivered to their final destinations. Essentially, there are no rules governing the end of the animals’ lives. The Animals International investigation tracked livestock exported from the EU to destinations in Croatia and six Middle Eastern nations. As Luke Dale-Harris reported in the Guardian, “The footage shows cattle and sheep from France, Romania and Lithuania kicking and flailing violently as their throats are crudely cut or sawed at repeatedly, often in crowded street markets and run-down abattoirs.”

Finance

• Clean Brexit or Dirty Brexit. This is the choice we now face. The choice we make will have profound consequences not just for the UK, but for the rest of the world. Consequences lasting generations.

• Rutland is home to “picture postcard cottages” and quaint towns brimming with antique shops and local galleries. It is Britain’s smallest county and its motto since 1950 has been Multum in Parvo, “much in little”. It does have a castle. And a population of 38,000 people.

• This is fewer than the number of people who die each year in Britain because of outdoor air pollution, according a report by the Royal College of Physicians (RCP). Pollution is closely associated with “heart disease, diabetes, obesity and changes linked to dementia”.

• Some car insurers charge higher premiums in Chicago’s minority neighborhoods than in predominantly white neighborhoods with similar insurance losses. The areas outlined in black are more than 50 percent minority. Many insurers charge the same premiums throughout Chicago, but quote higher prices than in suburbs with similar risk.

• Our analysis of premiums and payouts in California, Illinois, Texas and Missouri shows that some major insurers charge minority neighborhoods as much as 30 percent more than other areas with similar accident costs.

• The main economic story of the last four decades is the massive upward redistribution of income that has taken place. The top 1 percent’s share of national income has more than doubled over this period, from roughly 10 percent in the late 1970s to over 20 percent today. And this is primarily a before-tax income story: The rich have used their control over the levers of economic power to ensure that an ever-larger share of the country’s wealth goes into their pockets. (Yes, this is the topic of my book, Rigged.) (It’s free.)

• Simply put, the lives of young people are intimately tied to the health and well-being of older adults. That is, social expenditure at the beginning and end of life makes for greater social stability for all.

• Although spring is in the air and we are well into 2017, if you’re a woman, your paycheck is stuck in time, specifically at December 31, 2016. That’s because women — on average — earn just 80 percent of what men make, meaning that they must work until today, April 4, 2017, to earn what men earned by December 31, 2016.

• Texas Roadhouse has agreed to settle an age discrimination lawsuit by the government that accused the national steakhouse chain of labeling workers over 40 such things as “Old N’ Chubby” and rejecting them for jobs where customers see them.

• In a consent decree with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the company denied wrongdoing, but agreed to pay $12 million to be distributed to older workers who were denied jobs, as well as to have the chain’s hiring practices monitored for almost four years.

• The IRS’s Inspector General has confirmed what many of its victims have known all along: the Criminal Investigations’ asset forfeiture program isn’t really for “disrupting criminal enterprises.” It’s for taking money from innocent people.

• The Treasury Inspector General for the Tax Administration (TIGTA) took a look at forfeitures tied to the IRS’s so-called “structuring” cases. If you deposit more than $10,000 into a bank account, the IRS is notified and you, the depositor, have extra paperwork to fill out. This fulfills IRS reporting requirements and is generally a headache for the depositor and the bank.

• If you deposit less than $10,000 in cash, it’s perfectly legal. Do it often enough and the IRS starts to believe your cash deposits are the product of criminal activity. Even if you never have enough on hand to clear the $10,000 mark with a single deposit, a string of smaller deposits makes the IRS suspicious IRS’s eyeballs turn into dollar signs.

• Later this month, the third edition of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development week dedicated to electronic commerce will take place. With a value estimated at US$22 trillion globally, e-commerce is booming for business, but mostly still escaping developing countries.

• Speaking at a press briefing today, Torbjörn Fredriksson, chief of the UNCTAD ICT Analysis Section, Division on Technology and Logistics, said this year’s theme, “Towards Inclusive E-Commerce” is focused on ways to get more developing countries to seize opportunities offered by ecommerce and how they can tackle hurdles on the way to that integration.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The security reshuffle saw senior military and intelligence officials reinstated to the NCS after they had been bumped at the time of Bannon’s appointment in the early days of the administration. It was read through two prisms – new Trump National Security Adviser, US Army Lieutenant General HR McMaster is asserting himself; and after 75 days of administration chaos, when push comes to shove, Trump can be convinced to reshuffle even his closest aides.

• Some of the latest hooey uttered by White House press secretary Sean Spicer — the man from whom a seemingly bottomless wellspring of hooey flows — was his pronouncement the other day that having so many fabulously wealthy men and women working in the White House is a good and wondrous thing.

• “The president has brought a lot of people into this administration, and this White House in particular, who have been very blessed and very successful by this country, and have given up a lot to come into government by setting aside a lot of assets,” Spicer said.

• Days before the first debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, as protests at Standing Rock intensified and the costliest wildfire in United States history burned across Big Sur, some 150 current and former state legislators gathered in Colonial Williamsburg for a weekend of role play—to debate amendments to the U.S. constitution. The event was led by Ken Ivory, a state representative from Utah. “Like air in a tire, gas will expand to fill the space that is given to it. Government, like that, expands to the limit that it’s checked. Left unchecked, government expands limitlessly,” he told those gathered before him, according to a video later posted on YouTube. Addressing them for the last time, after several days of debate that culminated in passing three proposed (fake) amendments, he said, “It’s time for us to be leaders among leaders, to take this back, this spirit that we’ve felt—the beauty of self-governance.”

Censorship/Free Speech

• One of the other reasons why websites can find themselves losing payment services is if they are accused of being associated with the sale of goods that infringe copyright, patents, or trademarks. One program used to accomplish this is a shadowy agreement between the payment processors and the private International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition (IACC) called RogueBlock.

• Germany has formally announced its draconian push towards censorship of social media. On March 14, Germany’s Justice Minister Heiko Maas announced the plan to formalize into law the “code of conduct”, which Germany pressed upon Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in late 2015, and which included a pledge to delete “hate speech” from their websites within 24 hours.

• “This [draft law] sets out binding standards for the way operators of social networks deal with complaints and obliges them to delete criminal content,” Justice Minister Heiko Maas said in a statement announcing the planned legislation.

• It was originally scheduled in 2014 for the Britain’s Southampton University and was canceled after Zionists pressured university officials. It was briefly rescheduled once more in Southampton in response to outrage over the censorship only to be canceled once again. However, lead organizers, Oren Ben-Dor, James Bowen and George Bisharat did not give up. In the intervening months questions about the legitimacy of Israeli government actions only increased, and the original conference organizers were joined by more scholars and international legal experts determined to carry out a serious discussion about Palestine and international law.

• There’s a lot of writing these days about the Left being oversensitive crybabies that can’t handle free speech. Students shutting down racists like Milo Yiannopoulos and Charles Murray at the University of California Berkeley and Middlebury in Vermont made headlines in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, CNN, and Fox News.

• At the same time, liberals are also quick to (rightly) point their fingers at the Trump administration’s authoritarian tendencies — from threatening journalists with meritless libel suits to banning them from White House press conferences.

• But liberal institutions have hardly been open to those who challenge established orthodoxies. While universities often decry protests by their own students, they’ve shown an uncanny openness to certain outside third parties influencing hiring decisions and classroom curricula.

• Grisak then responded by bricking Martin’s product remotely

• [...]

• Your unit ID 2f0036… will be denied server connection.

• Calling censorship of media is morally wrong and harmful, the spiritual leader of Tibet, His Holiness the Dalai Lama Thursday said, “the 1.3 billion Chinese people have every right to know the reality.”

• While responding to reporters in India’s state of Arunachal Pradesh, on April 6, 2017, His Holiness called China an authoritarian country. “Nine years with Chinese communist, sometimes I express His Holiness the Dalai Lama jokingly said, “During this period, I have learned how to practice hypocrisy. Some system is sort of totalitarian, and authoritarian system, and no proper freedom.”

Privacy/Surveillance

• An interesting decision has been reached by the Florida Appeals Court as to Fourth Amendment protections for vehicle “black boxes.” The black boxes — which are a mandatory requirement in new vehicles — record a variety of data in the event of a crash. (h/t FourthAmendment.com)

• Charles Worsham Jr. was the driver in a crash in which his passenger was killed. His vehicle was seized and impounded by police. Twelve days later, police accessed the data in the black box without obtaining a warrant. Worsham challenged the lawfulness of the warrantless search. The police maintained the black box was full of third-party records which required no warrant or consent from the vehicle’s owner.

• The court sees the issue differently. In a relative rarity, the state Appeals Court decides [PDF] to get out ahead of the issue, rather than wait for precedential decisions to trickle down from the federal courts. It looks at the data harvested by the black box and suggests the amount gathered will only increase in the coming years. Rather than wait until then to make a call on the Fourth Amendment merits, it draws the line now.

• If you can’t read that, it’s an excerpt from an email saying that “this has become a very sensitive issue, especially since the President has gotten directly involved and contacted Acting Director Mike Reynolds concerned about one of the images…”

• It appears that other parts of the government are also deeply concerned with unmasking who’s involved in these things. Today, Twitter sued the US government because the Department of Homeland Security and its Customs & Border Protection division have apparently been trying to unmask the operator of the @ALT_uscis account, which claims to be run by people working for US Citizenship and Immigration Service presenting the “rogue” view on immigration issues.

• The Appeals Court of California has examined a set of release restrictions imposed on a teen convicted of minor sodomy against his girlfriend. The lower court — realizing it was being asked to step in and act as a proxy parent for the teen’s internet use — handed down a lengthy list of restrictions supposedly aimed at keeping the teen from committing further criminal acts. This included several restrictions on the teen’s internet use, for reasons only apparent to the lower court. (h/t Volokh Conspiracy)

• Fortunately, the Appeals Court has struck many of these restrictions, finding most of them overly-broad at best, and unreasonably (and unconstitutionally) restricting at worst. Most of these seem to have stemmed from the teen’s admission that he masturbated to internet porn once a week — something that could be said for a great many US citizens of many ages. That the court connected this to the crime committed appears to be the result of a prudish mindset: one that still believes access to pornography leads to criminal sexual acts, despite a great deal of evidence to the contrary.

• President Trump and his Republican allies in Congress recently rammed through legislation allowing broadband giants like Comcast, Verizon and AT&T to sell private consumer data to the highest bidder without asking for user permission.

• Now, furious open internet advocates are developing political strategies and street-level tactics designed to hold Republicans accountable in the 2018 midterm elections for what privacy watchdogs are calling one of the most brazen corporate giveaways in recent US history.

• Consumer advocates know that the privacy rollback—which eliminates the Federal Communications Commission’s landmark 2016 broadband protections—is extremely unpopular with the American people. And they’re not going to let voters forget how more than 200 GOP lawmakers sold out consumer privacy to the nation’s largest internet service providers.

• One of the reasons the digital world is so exciting — and so attractive to startups and investors — is that network effects help companies to grow quickly, until they end up with what amounts to a monopoly in a sector. A particularly powerful monopoly that is exercising people at the moment is Facebook, and for multiple reasons. Its huge user base is making it so attractive to advertisers that traditional publishers are badly impacted. Another issue is that its reach is so great that it is hard to stop so-called “fake news” from being shared rapidly and widely across the social network, with potentially serious real-world effects.

• But there’s a third aspect, so far little remarked upon, that is brought out well in a post by Jason Ditzian on The Bold Italic site. For the last decade, he’s been a keen user of City CarShare, a nonprofit car-sharing service with vehicle stations around the Bay Area.

• Instant messaging has become the main digital tool for social and political activism.

• [...]

• Freedom of expression is one of the pillars of modern democracy, and the right to the privacy of our communications is a part of it. During the last century it was said that, in some dictatorships, they opened letters with steam – so that the peeping could go unnoticed -, they read the contents – to detect divergent thinking -, they closed the envelopes again, and let the letters reach their addressees – to avoid suspicions.

• Today, when we send a message from the simulated intimacy our electronic devices give us, it is traced by a complex communication intercepting system. The root cause of the problem is this: the internet is a network designed for sharing information which, at the time it was created, was not intended for its current use – nor was the problem of privacy taken into account.

• Recent research found that an average user touches their mobile phone 2,617 times a day and a heavy user swipes, taps, and clicks more than 5,000 times per day! That’s nearly three to four hours a day of lost productivity.

• New rules allowing the US National Security Agency (NSA) to share private data with other US agencies without court oversight, recent revelations about surveillance activities by a US electronic communications service provider and vacancies on US oversight bodies are among the concerns raised by MEPs in a resolution passed on Thursday.

• The Customs and Border Protection agency, which is seeking to unmask the account holder, issued Twitter a summons (PDF), unsigned by a judge, citing a section of federal law granting border officials the power to investigate importation taxes. Twitter is refusing to unmask the account holder, saying the government is “abusing” its authority by making the demand without a legal basis.

Civil Rights/Policing

• The Texas Democrat knows her bill has no hope of becoming law, and has introduced it to satirise how women have been affected by targeted healthcare legislation in her state, particularly relating to abortion.

• As the 2016 presidential campaign rolled to a close, prize-winning playwright Robert Schenkkan was disgusted by the diminished standards that had come to define the electoral process.

• “I felt that regardless of who got elected, lines had been crossed, and those historical agreements, spoken and unspoken, about our two-party system, had been irretrievably damaged over the course of the election,” Schenkkan told Truthdig. “[There was] a coarsening of public discourse, the elimination of even a modicum of respect. And reasoned debate had been tossed in favor of a carnival-like click-bait.”

• Schenkkan’s disgust inspired his new play, “Building the Wall,” which he wrote during seven feverish days in late October. The play currently is running at The Fountain Theatre in Hollywood and will roll out across the country in coming weeks.

• Minnesota’s House of Representatives voted on Monday to stiffen penalties for protesters who block traffic on highways and other roadways. The move was seen as a response to recent highway blockades in the state utilized by Black Lives movement demonstrators to protest the police shooting of unarmed African-American men.

• The provision, which was part of a public safety package, would make blockading a highway a “gross misdemeanor” punishable by up to a $3,000 fine and up to a year in jail. Dissenting Democratic lawmakers tried to strip the provision from the bill, but failed in a 56-75, mostly party-line vote.

• I quite genuinely have no idea whether the point Livingstone makes is historically true, and if so how fringe or not were the elements involved in the relationship. But it is not relevant. It would be surprising if there did not, in the very early stages of Nazi power, appear to a few fringe elements to be some room to explore common interests between those who wanted Jews to leave Germany, and those who wanted to establish a Jewish homeland in the Middle East. Everyone was trying to accommodate to the difficult fact of Nazi power. The British royal family and aristocracy, the Pope, Northcliffe and his Daily Mail, David Lloyd George, pretty well all of corporate Germany and, I even admit, a very few isolated Scottish nationalists, failed at some stages to realise or to respond correctly to the evil of Nazism and sought various ways to use Nazi Germany to forward their own interests. Some of these were very culpable. You can find attempts on that difficult spectrum from accommodation to collaboration in various forms everywhere, in almost every community.

• I do not want to see the apartheid state of Israel continue in its current form, though as with apartheid South Africa I wish to see a solution to unifying Palestine that does not involve further forced movement of any population. But I do not in any sense accept a historically important link between Israel and the Nazis, except in the obvious sense that revulsion at the Holocaust created the conditions for international acceptance of the violent establishment of Israel. Picking at the oddities of history on such a sensitive subject is mischievous.

• [...]

• I therefore think that Livingstone was wrong to blunder into discussing Hitler’s alleged early support for Zionism, and much more wrong not to then realise this was a mistake and to apologise. I do not however believe that in any sense his motivation was personal anti-Semitism, and I do not believe that anybody believes he is genuinely somebody who dislikes Jewish people.

• Three weeks ago, people from across the country tuned in on a Saturday night as the ACLU kicked off a new grassroots mobilization program called People Power, which laid out a new strategy and vision for resisting the Trump administration’s worst abuses of our freedoms. We wanted people to do more than donate and march — we wanted them to organize in their communities, meet with local law enforcement officials, and change local policies to establish Freedom Cities where immigrants and Muslims would be better protected from the Trump administration’s attempts to trample on civil liberties.

• Last year, in the wake of the killing of Freddie Gray, the Justice Department conducted an in-depth pattern-and-practice investigation of the Baltimore Police Department and released stunning findings documenting the brutal, longstanding, and unconstitutional mistreatment of city residents at the hands of police. Soon after, the Justice Department and the city of Baltimore negotiated a consent decree, whereby the city agreed to a federal court order requiring a detailed police reform process. Throughout, the BPD and the city’s leadership have repeatedly stated that without immediate and strong reforms, the mostly Black and brown communities most brutalized by police have no reason to trust police — undermining public safety.

• Perpetually detained Singaporean teenager Amos Yee is still detained in the United States despite being granted asylum two weeks ago.

• Human Rights Watch (HRW) and PEN America have asked the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials to release supposedly free man Amos Yee immediately.

• In a press release today, HRW said that Yee was granted asylum by a US immigration judge on March 24 but remains in ICE custody.

• “The question that has to be asked is, what is the alternative?” Mr. Basham said. “You can’t just step back and say it costs too much to protect these people.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• While FCC boss Ajit Pai has repeatedly claimed his top priority while running the FCC is eliminating the digital divide, his behavior in just the first few months of his term has made that claim utterly and indisuptably laughable. It doesn’t take a sociology degree to realize that Pai’s recent decisions to protect prison phone monopolies, protect the cable box monopoly, undermine efforts to bring broadband to the poor and dismantle net neutrality solely help one particular constituency: the telecom sector’s biggest, wealthiest, and most powerful providers.

• And while repealing a previous FCC’s policies isn’t entirely new or unexpected (especially from somebody with Pai’s extremely mono/duopoly friendly voting record), Pai has been pushing his purview even further. Last week the FCC boss announced that he’d even begun stripping away at the conditions attached to Charter’s $79 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks.

• For Roku and others in the business, an end to the Obama-era protections could make it harder — or, in some cases, more expensive — to offer content or services to customers at top download speeds.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• A years-long fight in Italy between copyright rightsholders (chiefly Hollywood) and consumer groups looking to protect Italian citizens, took a dark turn recently. If you aren’t already aware, the Italian government put in place a delightful regulation in 2014 giving the Authority for Comunications Guarantees (AGCOM) the authority to simply block websites deemed infringing outright, without the need for such pesky things as court cases or trials. Consumer groups immediately challenged the regulation, stating that it violated the Italian constitution, specifically suggesting that giving a government body the authority to unilaterally block websites without any sort of judicial review was a violation of the exercise of freedom of expression and economic initiative. Given exactly how often demonized websites are demonstrated to have perfectly legitimate uses, not to mention how absolutely terrible every government everywhere seems to be in understanding and protecting things like Fair Use, it’s an easy argument to understand.

• Unfortunately, an administrative court in Italy has chosen to take itself out of the judicial review business when it comes to site-blocking.

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